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Overview
New York City’s performing arts community suffered greatly from a severe reduction in grants in the mid-1970s. A scholar and playwright, Miller skillfully synthesizes economics, urban planning, tourism, and immigration to create a map of the interconnected urban landscape and to contextualize the struggle for resources. She reviews how numerous theater professionals, including Ellen Stewart of La MaMa E.T.C. and Julie Bovasso, Vinnette Carroll, and Joseph Papp of The Public Theater, developed innovative responses to survive the crisis.
Combining theater history and close readings of productions, each of Miller’s chapters is a case study focusing on a company, a production, or an element of New York’s theater infrastructure. Her expansive survey visits Broadway, Off-, Off-Off-, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, community theater, and other locations to bring into focus the large-scale changes wrought by the financial realignments of the day.
Nuanced, multifaceted, and engaging, Miller’s lively account of the financial crisis and resulting transformation of the performing arts community offers an essential chronicle of the decade and demonstrates its importance in understanding our present moment.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810133884 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2016 |
| Series: | Performance Works |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Drop Dead
Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York
By Hillary Miller
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3389-1
CHAPTER 1
Planned Shrinkage and the New Theater
Ellen Stewart, La Mama E.T.C., and Julie Bovasso
Whatever contribution has been made, it is not because I take La Mama anywhere, it is because La Mama takes me.
— Ellen Stewart
Julie Bovasso's The Moon Dreamers, a play that inaugurated a new decade and a new theater space at La Mama E.T.C. in 1969, scrambled the conventions of Off-Off Broadway performance. The new Lower East Side (LES) multi-theater space, named after La Mama's founder and figurehead, Ellen Stewart, presented The Moon Dreamers in its giant, garage-like interior with brick surfaces and rough lumber scaffolding. Bovasso's script calls for "an architectural hallucination" and smoke rising from the floor as a succession of bewildered chorus members gather on stage, beginning with a crippled, bloody soldier. Three black stockbrokers follow, and, after them, an Indian Chief (who is really, the stage directions indicate, a Zen Buddhist priest), a Beggar Groom and his Beggar Bride, a Gold Star Mother, a lawyer in a raccoon coat and a straw hat, and six cherubic angels. Each waves a tiny American flag. The music: military marches, 1930s foxtrot, patriotic World War I anthems, 1920s ragtime. Ziegfeld Nurses arrive to dance a Hospital Ballet with the soldiers; next, the stockbrokers engage in a soft shoe dance competition with the bandaged men, who can muster only an imitation of the brokers' prowess. New York Times critic Dan Sullivan compared this horror-filled musical prelude to "a floorshow in hell." At its close, six angels dance on the stage furniture and ineptly set the props: the protagonists, Rene, Sandra, and Mimi, enter, "playing at being themselves as the actors, not the characters," and tussle violently with a demented angel. Finally, the play begins: "Well, I guess this is it."
The plot — for lack of a better term — revolves around a simple conflict: Rene has cheated on Sandra with Mimi, but cannot determine who should be forced to leave the apartment. A mad parade of supporting characters hunt for an elusive resolution: lawyers, police, stockbrokers, cousins, doctors, Buddhists, and poets. At the end of the labyrinthine three-hour play, the deus ex machina arrives in the form of Ira, a capitalist astronaut. He implores the remaining ragtag characters — an unhappy couple, a midget Police Chief (played by later Fantasy Island star Hervé Villechaize), a Jewish mother, their lawyers, their accountants, and a Swedish-speaking Geisha — to join him on the Moon, where various Ministries awaited their new ministers.
Analyzed on the scale of the nation, the play commented on a deluded and exhausted country anesthetized by Doublemint gum commercials while aspiring to intergalactic colonization. The dramaturgy of The Moon Dreamers also presented a cautionary tale: the New Yorkers in the play forge ahead with clueless ambition, suggestive of a city full of demented bureaucrats and megalomaniac poets no better than their Napoleonic police. Bovasso, who also directed the production, crammed forty-three principals onto the stage, nearly as many players as there were seats in La Mama's previous theater space. But it was not just Actors' Equity rules and cramped basement theaters that the Bovasso aesthetic mocked; on the downtown performance scene, a restless and expansionist avant-garde outgrew its playgrounds to find a Tower of Babel awaiting them. The characters speak English, Swedish, Chinese, Italian, and gibberish; their desires are hysterical, their conflicts self-reinforcing. "What do you mean, dream's over?" a desperate lawyer asks a psychiatrist, holding tightly to the fantasy of Jungian interpretation. Bovasso's writing and direction stressed the uncanny contours of loss, experienced through the performers' resistance to their roles, and the playwright's insistence on a fraudulent dramatis personae. The play laughed in the face of those who saw this theater — and La Mama itself — as amateurish, inessential, minimal, predictable, traceable to any single tradition or mode.
Some critics, however, discerned the corruption of OOB's cooperative approach in La Mama's new foundation-funded premises, "businesslike" ticketing policy, and uptown press coverage. La Mama had stepped boldly into a new decade on the LES, committed to the production of new space as much as new theater. Stewart's choice of Bovasso as one of the inaugural playwright/directors in the Ellen Stewart Theatre announced as much. While reviewers attached blanket labels of "experimental" or "avant-garde" to Stewart's venue with frequency, Bovasso's theatrical language aligned with La Mama's curatorial hand. Stewart herself referred to the work at La Mama as "New Theatre," which she described in early interviews as "subliminal theatre" interested in "unconscious receptivity." For some, this New Theatre formed out of the residue of an Old Theatre — Bovasso, for example, directed the first stateside productions of Genet and Ionesco at her Tempo Playhouse on East 8th Street in 1953, after briefly working with the Living Theatre in 1952. The works of Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco, Brecht, and Tennessee Williams appealed to Stewart's interests, but as the 1960s drew to a close, Stewart used her theatrical platform to feature bold auteurs with sweeping visual spectacle and pronounced musicality. The new building at 74A East 4th Street facilitated and advanced this "big-set" aesthetic.
This marked a major turning point in the history of Off-Off Broadway theater; of the four main venues of OOB (Caffe Cino, Theatre Genesis, Judson Poets' Theater, and La Mama), only La Mama survives today. La Mama had opened its doors as a basement theater/café with Tennessee Williams's One Arm in 1962. Money from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Doris Duke Foundations funded the purchase and renovation of the dilapidated building on East 4th Street in 1969. While some OOB theaters confronted the demands of institutional durability with ambivalence, La Mama entered the 1970s with transformative conceptions of space and urban cultural cohesion, raising the question: what is at stake when theaters just can't wing it anymore? What if, in addition to the OOB artist as trailblazer, as nuisance, and as disrupter of set patterns, the narrative is also of a particular institution, one built, aggregated, and consolidated by theatrical labors? Stephen Bottoms declares that by 1969, La Mama decisively "won the race for institutionalization," yet the real process of "sustainable assimilation into existing economic structures" required more than foundation funding and ticketing policies: it necessitated an even deeper connection to the community, something that onlookers argue La Mama severed by 1969. Rather than inaugurating the betrayal of her underground roots and off-off ethos, this contradictory turning point prepared La Mama to withstand the pressures of the arduous 1970s on the LES. La Mama did not institutionalize through structural trappings alone but produced new relationships within the brittle urban ecosystem. The theater defied socially destructive municipal policies through interdependence and collaboration — between artists, their funding sources, and municipal systems.
While the security of a foundation-funded space assisted in Stewart's ability to protect her theater, these relationships proved decisive. La Mama company members began touring internationally in 1965 and Stewart initiated early play exchanges with artists from Denmark, India, and Poland. But La Mama New York remained loyal to one site: the Lower East Side. It was there that La Mama became what Brian Massumi, drawing from Madeline Gins and Arakawa, calls "a landing site," an urban form that offers useful connections and platforms for possible action. The uncertain encounters of the Situationists — in which group members arrived at street corners at predesignated times, destined only for the possibility of an appointment — inspired Massumi's theorization. His essay applies these "virtual appointments" of the Situationists — pregnant with the potential for recognition — to contemporary art interventions. Here, the descriptor illuminates La Mama as a performance site that altered the perceptual conditions of local space and crystallized "unaccustomed possibilities" for the neighborhood. Elsewhere, with Erin Manning, Massumi emphasizes the process of landing, an interfusing of "agency and patience," two elements characteristic of Stewart's strategies toward institutionalization.
The significance of this landing is found in La Mama's ability to both connect itself to the machinations of the city and also create the frameworks to withstand them. On La Mama's stages throughout the 1970s, the abundant spectacles of its artist innovators (such as Bovasso, Andrei Serban, the Tokyo Kid Brothers, Wilford Leach, and Playhouse of the Ridiculous director John Vaccaro) presented "a 'more' postulating the existence of an elsewhere, beyond the conventional logic of that place." Why did La Mama perform this postulation? What necessitated this push beyond the conventional logic of place? Why engineer the "existence of an elsewhere" if there was where La Mama wanted to be? And if, in this definition, a landing site is somehow "sculpted" to the needs of the human body, what function did La Mama fulfill within the needs of the city or neighborhood?
Any answer must take into account the relationship between La Mama's institutionalization and the fraying of support systems during this era in the city, when interdependent civic and social networks disintegrated within the urban ecosystem. Dolores Hayden's definition of "cultural landscape" situates the theater on the LES:
The history of the cultural landscape is about larger environments, collectively formed, changing over time. It is the story of how places are planned, designed, built, inhabited, appropriated, celebrated, despoiled, and discarded. Indigenous residents as well as colonizers, ditch diggers as well as architects, migrant workers as well as mayors, housewives as well as housing inspectors, are all active shaping the urban cultural landscape.
The notion of "landing sites," linked to Hayden's definition of cultural landscape, renders Stewart's work more visible as a shaper of the LES, and the LES as a shaper of her theater. The LES at this time confounded a usual assumption of urban space: the sites of the city could no longer be trusted. Urban policies divested swaths of blocks and dictated cutbacks to neighborhood-based programs. Inequitable development practices spread, and the public resources available to certain neighborhoods (the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Bushwick) thinned. "Planned shrinkage" was the darker edge of a deluded urban policy that ultimately overwhelmed entire segments of the city with neglect. This touched many spheres of existence: from health care to morale to crime to infrastructure to housing stock to the life of the street to local cultural practices.
La Mama's institutionalization connects directly to this particular moment in New York's urban history. As a growing institution, La Mama resisted policies dictating shrinkage and closure. Because the geographic location of a performance venue "anchors theatre practice in social, cultural, and historical contexts," the processes of neighborhood divestment and theatrical institutionalization developed concurrently, and the complexity of their interactions obscured La Mama's contributions to the neighborhood itself. Media coverage imbued Stewart's theater with certain narratives, many of them fabricated, others merely superficial. They accused Stewart of staging chaotic works that mirrored and even exacerbated the perceived decline of the downtown area.
Following Hayden, however, La Mama's (theater) workers were central to "building" the city, a claim that should redress La Mama's absence from academic discourse and mainstream arts reporting. Cindy Rosenthal proposes that Stewart's resistance to categorization played a role in this omission, as did her reputation as a "catalyst" rather than an artist. Yet while the latter might explain elements of her artistic legacy, it does not account for La Mama's conflicted legacy as an institution, embodied not only by its thin representation in the relevant scholarship, but also in the funding agencies that gave repeatedly to New York's "Big Daddies" of the theater — "Mayor" Joe Papp and Harvey Lichtenstein — on a scale not afforded to La Mama. We have looked to the "Big Daddies" for our civic institutions, and, as David Savran has argued, our avant-garde.
It is not just the questionable consecration of the avant-garde that muddies the role of La Mama and its geographic specificity. In some narratives of OOB, creative freedom leads to vulnerability, and monetary success victimizes. This dominates analyses of the Caffe Cino, established in 1958 by Joe Cino, a former dancer, in a shoebox of a storefront on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village, celebrated for its "Dionysian magic madness" and shows put on without "paperwork, subsidies, or corporate grants." The "free theater ethos" of the 1960s included freedom from more than just expensive ticket prices: "free of creative interference from backers; freewheeling, reciprocal collaboration between artists." The horizon of performance on the other side of this decade hardly sounds appealing. This also reflects a criticism leveled at Stewart by some of her contemporaries: after she received the foundation checks that allowed her to purchase her new multi-theater space in 1969, some in the OOB scene expressed ambivalence about La Mama turning "professional."
New theater premises and ticketing procedures signaled Stewart's long-held desire to push beyond the skeletal financial model of La Mama's early years. She never romanticized a vision of her theater wholly supported by her earnings as a fashion designer. By 1968, Stewart already expressed deep grief over having her actors work "all day on a cup of instant coffee," a telling confession at a time when many theater artists viewed autonomy from commercial concerns as an essential ingredient of OOB. Politically hard-to-categorize theaters like La Mama (whose work did not receive sustained analysis until Cindy Rosenthal's 2006 article in TDR: The Drama Review) and artists like Julie Bovasso operated on the margins of the dramatic canon and yet functioned centrally in the development of performance practices on the LES during this period.
The fiscal crisis enacted an aggressive incursion into a tumultuous period in downtown theatrical production, and the fracturing of the LES coincided with the death knell of its prodigious playwrights wing. As members of a vibrant yet nascent phenomenon, the leaders of OOB fought to expand beyond the small theaters of downtown and to gain some measure of financial security after years of shoestring operations. City agencies and neighborhood politics pushed the West Village incarnation of OOB to the East Side of downtown, and then, once there, artists ran headlong into the city's "triage" urban policy of the 1970s. For the coterie of playwright-directors working out of La Mama, the spirit of the prior decades necessitated new models of autonomy and survival. Playwrights joined together in coalitions as opportunities for staging their work rapidly disappeared while community activists agitated against the displacement of low-income, working-class tenants. The spatial restructuring of the LES across the 1970s had decisive repercussions for theaters, which could not exempt themselves from the complex economic transitions (and fractional politics) of the fiscal crisis period. In this chapter, La Mama as landing site provides a conceptual frame for analyses of the performance work on its stages, as well as Stewart's resistance of dominant austerity ideologies.
Triage
Suppose a consortium of foundations erected a replica of the East Village somewhere in the badlands of the Dakotas, a place where all the heroin anyone could want would be placed neatly in his veins. Would that draw dangerous street criminals away from the cities, as the Western frontier drew off some of the city's less docile residents in the nineteenth century?
— Roger Starr
As urban creatures go, Ellen Stewart and Roger Starr represent utterly divergent worlds and worldviews. Starr was a Manhattan-born conservative-leaning commentator on urban affairs who served three mayors, was New York City's Housing and Development administrator from 1974 to 1976, and later enjoyed a lengthy career on the editorial board of the New York Times. Stewart was born in Louisiana in 1919 with a childhood spent in Detroit and Chicago, culminating in a 1950 migration to New York with dreams of attending fashion design school. She opened her café theater in the basement of a tenement on East Ninth Street in 1961, became a fixture on the alternative theater scene, and in 1985 received a MacArthur Fellowship "Genius" Grant for her efforts.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Drop Dead by Hillary Miller. Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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